I was in a parish outside my diocese recently, and I read a bulletin announcement similar to one that appears in thousands of parishes every Sunday. The announcement invited all those who had never been baptized, or who had been baptized in another tradition, or who had been baptized Catholic but not received the sacraments […]
Why no one should join the RCIA
People often ask me who they need to have on their RCIA teams. By that, they generally mean, what job descriptions do they need to fill. In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins makes the point that getting the right kind of people is more important than filling the right job descriptions. If you
Who do you need on the RCIA team?
We have a new pastor, and he told us that we are not supposed to be confirming adult Catholics at the Easter Vigil. If confirmation is an initiation sacrament, what’s wrong with celebrating it at the Vigil? Your question raises a larger issue of who should be celebrating sacraments at the Easter Vigil. I’ve seen
Should we confirm Catholics at the Easter Vigil?
The news outlets are filled with speculation and commentary about Barack Obama’s transition team and his choice of cabinet members and White House staff. Yesterday the stock market rose 500 points simply because Obama announced who his Secretary of the Treasury would be. There are a lot of reasons that knowing who Obama plans to
An RCIA lesson from Barack Obama—community
This past weekend, I was helping to lead a Concerning the Baptized institute, which was cosponsored by the North American Forum on the Catechumenate and the Diocese of Monterey. As described on the Forum Web site, the institute explores the “suitable paths to Eucharist for both baptized-catechized adults and baptized-uncatechized adults.” While I was there,
What does it mean to be catechized?
One of the little-known (and oft-ignored) directives of the U.S. National Statutes for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults is found in number 2, which states unambiguously that baptized Christians who are received into the full communion of the Catholic Church are NOT to be called converts. The term convert is to be strictly
QI was wondering if you could give some guidance about sacramental preparation for older children (baptized Catholic, but formally uncatechized) 3rd grade and above, since there is little consistency among parishes within our diocese. In most cases, these children (primarily 3rd-6th grade) have had no formal catechesis and have not celebrated first confession or first
How to prepare baptized, uncatechized Catholic children
In your RCIA process, do your catechumens and baptized candidates know the difference between Eucharist and communion? In 2008, Bishop William Murphy of Rockville Center released a pastoral letter in which he ended his diocese’s practice of celebrating communion services in place of weekday or Sunday Mass. His reason for doing so was, partly, because
Eucharist and communion—what’s the difference?
QOur church has just added over 100 children (candidates), 9 to 17-years-old, into the RCIA program. I have not been able to find information on discerning these baptized children. I am fairly new to the team and am finding discernment of children, or rather more specifically trying to determine when and who is ready, very
100 children in RCIA—what would you do?
